#crazycolonel From a 2010 West Point Graduate. I cannot begin to tell you how much his words mean to me... COL Ragsdale, You don’t know me, but I’m sure that at least a few times I supported you as you crowd surfed through throngs of cheering cadets several years ago. I enjoy writing letters to people who have left me something important. Usually that means teachers or leaders who have spent a significant amount of time around me, but every so often you can take something very important from someone you don’t even know. In the late fall of 2009, I headed to Philadelphia for my fourth Army/Navy game. My roommate and I had a serious conversation with each other before the game. We had spent three years getting whipped into a wild GO ARMY frenzy, only to be just beaten down when the game ended in our defeat. The year before in particular was a crushing loss. “Listen, we just can’t do that again,” we said to each other. “This year, we’re not going to let ourselves just go for it. We can’t afford to commit that hard again. We’re going to go, support the team, and let ourselves just not get too into it.” It was reasonable and protective, but it was a decision made out of defeat. We showed up, completed our customarily flawless march on, and took to the stands. As the game began, we didn’t start shouting immediately. We just watched calmly. We gently complimented good things the team did. We quietly shook our heads when the team did something bad. But it didn’t last long. It could only have been five minutes into the game when we saw the far corner of the Corps of Cadets swirling in a familiar tide of activity and excitement: We knew COL Ragsdale was around. Then, you appeared! Fist outreached toward the field, maniacally gripping the overcoat of the cadet next to you, we didn’t need to look up to the jumbo screen to see the raw, unbridled commitment to the team surging from you. It was palpable, and it spread through the ranks. My roommate and I looked at each other. In that moment, we knew we had been fooling ourselves. We had to commit. We had to go for it. We turned back to the field and roared back to the team that we were there. The rest of the game, we stood on our chairs, we screamed, we cheered, we cursed, and we exhausted ourselves. We spent our fourth Army/Navy game locked on to our team, relentlessly putting whatever we could give onto the field. Army lost that game. We kind of expected them to. But we fought on anyway. We couldn’t look at you and accept tepid commitment to our team. We knew that you would never quit going nuts for the Army team, and we knew that we couldn’t quit either. The summer of 2013 was the lowest point I’ve had in the Army so far. I was on my third deployment to Afghanistan and we were in full-blown retrograde. It was a touchy time. The enemy had mostly left us alone as we closed down our COPs, waiting for the ANSF to be alone before launching regular, serious attacks. We weren’t sure if they’d try to hit us on the way out or if they’d stick to the pattern. Waiting for us to leave was safer for them, but robbed them of the morale/IO opportunity to claim they forced us out. Meanwhile, a serious insider attack hit one of the FOBs to our south, killing several members of the brigade staff in the neighboring province. We were tense, and I was beaten down. My chain of command was focused on post-retrograde operations, and as an intelligence officer, I felt alone when it came to the daily fight. Our boys were going out every day, and no one seemed to care about that. I remember sitting in the plywood-and-steel SCIF with my targeting analyst just feeling unsupported and broken. Now that all our COPs were closed, all our CPs were right around the battalion headquarters, so every day I’d make the rounds and check on the companies. I remembered that feeling I had watching the Army team get beaten over and over. I knew I couldn’t quit. I knew I had to commit. So every day, I went to see those company commanders and platoon leaders. I found them good patrol locations, and I prepared all the info I could on the area and the threat. They asked about the big picture, the small picture, the routes. And I answered. I researched, I produced, and I briefed all day, every day. I knew we weren’t making a big difference in the strategic picture, but I also knew that the enemy knew we were still there to fight. I wasn’t on the field when the football team played. In country, I typically got bumped from patrols for space, especially toward the end. I was never the person in a position to make the big plays or do the biggest, most important things. But I learned that even as a simple cadet screaming on the sidelines, I had a role to play and that I had to choose how well I played that role. I could have phoned it in. But that’s not what I learned from you. I learned that no matter what my role is, I have to give it everything I have. I may feel alone, scared, frustrated, or hopeless, but I still have a role to play. I remember platoon leaders coming to me to talk about missions; one in particular expressed surprise at how interested I was in his mission and how much time I wanted to spend preparing him for the patrol. I realized in that moment that I was totally committed. I was hurting, but without realizing it, I was still fighting anyway. That moment sparked the first hope I’d felt in a while. We were going to keep fighting, when we felt flush with victory and also when we were coming back from a loss. I look back to those days with a degree of small, private pride. There was a lot of bitterness in my battalion at the time. I’m thankful that I learned from some great leaders to always keep fighting. I didn’t give in the bitterness and complacency that some did. When things are looking bad and hopeless, I will always remember seeing you shouting forth nothing but motivation in the face of defeat. I wish I had a story about how the Army team came back and beat Navy because we all cheered as enthusiastically as we could. But the Army team is like the real Army: something things go wrong. Sometimes you lose. People will get wounded and killed. Plans will go awry. But we fight on. Thank you for that, sir. I appreciate your absolute commitment to supporting cadets, your commitment to the Army team, and most importantly for the example you set for all of us. You left an indelible mark on myself and my classmates, and surely countless classes before and behind me. Thanks for an example that reaches beyond the fields of friendly strife. On a different field, on a different day, your commitment to victory echoed for me. Respectfully, CPT R. Marshall Rogers, c/o 2010
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 19:26:51 +0000
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